SURVEYING the row of door buzzers outside the hulking Brooklyn building
where the artist Sue de Beer works, it somehow seems fitting to find a
lone occupant listed on the building's top floor, with no further
explanation: "GOD."

"I don't know who that is or what they do," Ms. de Beer said, breaking
into a laugh when a reporter pointed out the small handwritten label
next to the buzzer. "I've never really been up to that floor."

But given the nature of her work and especially her most recent creation
- a lush, frankly mystical video piece called "The Ghosts" that will
have its debut Thursday in an unlikely place, one of the stately period
rooms at the Park Avenue Armory - it is tempting to imagine the Holy
Ghost himself at work up there in an old warehouse on the Red Hook
flatlands, not far from a dingy bus depot, an Ikea and a discount store
called 99 Cent Dreams.

Over the last decade Ms. de Beer has built a cult following for the dark
and often disturbing ways that she mixes the profane and the sacred - or
at least a postmodern version of the sacred, a longing to escape the
confines of ordinary consciousness for something perhaps more beautiful
or true.

The exhibition at the Armory and a show of related sculpture to open
Feb. 18 at the Marianne Boesky Gallery in Chelsea are the most prominent
presentation of Ms. de Beer's work in the United States since she first
became known through her inclusion in the 2004 Whitney Biennial and
entered many prominent public collections, like those of the Museum of
Modern Art and the New Museum of Contemporary Art.

In the work for which she is best known, videos that have mined the
underbelly of youth culture - a critic once described her as "the
pre-eminent auteur of teen angst" - the supernatural, or at least
supranormal, has never been quite so front and center as it is in "The
Ghosts," which Ms. de Beer describes as a turning point, three years in
the making.

But it has never been far outside the frame. The adolescent bedrooms
that so often serve as the centerpieces of her creations, cluttered with
posters and guitars and packs of cigarettes, have seemed at times like
existential anterooms, where the occupants await some kind of apotheosis
with the help of love or drugs or other mechanisms for escape.

Like, for instance, the sensory deprivation tank in which Ms. de Beer
spent many dark, quiet hours when she lived in Berlin, with a pyramid
above it for energy-channeling. ("It was kind of hokey," she said.) Or
the hypnotists she began to visit there and in New York, who informed
the creation of the central character in "The Ghosts," a hollow-cheeked
hypnotist convincingly played by a fellow artist, Jutta Koether, a
painter and musician.

"What I wanted was some kind of a nonverbal, non-narrative experience
outside myself, something like a state of total belief without having to
articulate a belief system," Ms. de Beer, 37, said in a recent interview
in her studio, where she shot much of the new video in small rooms with
the windows blacked out. "But I don't know if I ever got there."

The new 30-minute two-screen video grew out of a period of desperation
in her life, after a year in which she made no art at all. At that time,
in 2007, she was traveling almost nonstop, mostly between Berlin, where
she lived for several years, and New York, where she is now an assistant
professor at New York University.

"I was burned out to the point where I just couldn't do anything
creative, and so I actually kind of gave up, and it was liberating,"
said Ms. de Beer, who, despite the Stygian nature of her fascinations,
is engaging and open in person, exuding a kind of rock-geek cool.

In the winter of her bad year, the sun would set in Berlin before 4 in
the afternoon, she said. She started venturing out only at night, riding
the U-Bahn subway trains alone with a notebook, trying to write. Then
for two months she locked herself in a room with only a desk, a chair
and a blanket, rarely coming out.

When she did, she had written the basic script for "The Ghosts," which
follows three characters - a young woman, a record-store clerk and a
money manager (played by Jon Spencer, singer and guitarist for the Jon
Spencer Blues Explosion, whom Ms. de Beer persuaded to act for the first
time) - as they seek the help of the hypnotist to deal with loss and
longing.

In doing so, they conjure up ghosts - frightening-looking ones, who owe
a visual debt to Ms. de Beer's long fascination with horror films and,
lately, to the particularly bloody 1970s Italian subgenre known as
giallo. The ghosts seem to be challenging the viewer to decide whether
they are mere memories or phantasms of a more substantial sort - or
whether, in the end, it really matters.

In her early years Ms. de Beer was often identified among the
practitioners of a death-haunted, neo-Gothic strain of contemporary art
that emerged after 9/11, a list that included Banks Violette and David
Altmejd. But the new work, while playing with those expectations, owes a
lot more to Proust than to Poe, as a wrenching examination of memory and
the ways it shapes identity.

"I think that over the last several years she's developed a signature
style and voice that's all her own," said Lauren Ross, the curator and
director of arts programs for the High Line and a former chief curator
at White Columns, who has followed Ms. de Beer's work. "It's always
seemed to me that she is after a certain kind of character, one
constantly in danger of losing control of the self. I think she's very
interested in how thin that line is."

She added: "I've always found her work to be extremely unsettling, It's
always taken me out of my comfort zone."

Doreen Remen, one of the founders of the Art Production Fund, the
nonprofit organization that is bringing the video to the Armory with the
help of Sotheby's, the event's sponsor, said the fund was interested in
helping stage a video project in New York partly because "video has the
ability to bridge a kind of audience gap that exists in contemporary
art."

"And," she added, "I think that with this work, Sue is playing more with
the conventions of movie entertainment in a way that is going to grab
people, even though it's not a conventional movie by any means."

Because of great difficulty finding production money for the video in
2008 as the economy plunged, Ms. de Beer's ghosts were whipped up mostly
on the cheap, using naked actresses spray-painted white, head to toe,
and chocolate sauce for the blood that oozes from the mouth of one of
them, all of it transformed later in the editing room, where she spent
months shaping two terabyte hard drives full of footage.

"I was doing all this research on how to make a ghost on essentially a
two-dollar budget without making it look just laughably hilarious," she
said.

Her sets, which have always worn their high-school-play artificiality
proudly, in this case really needed to do so because of budget concerns.
A few helpers built a late '70s Trans Am from wood - complete with the
phoenix hood decal known in its day as the screaming chicken - spending
little money except on a certain smokeable substance to make the
experience more enjoyable. The only real splurge, Ms. de Beer said, was
hiring a cat trainer and a large white Persian cat named Snoebell,
indulging a visual fascination she finds hard to explain. (Snoebell also
appeared in a 2009 video.)

Ms. de Beer met Mr. Spencer through the members of a German band called
the Cobra Killers. He said he became involved partly because she
described the project as a horror film and he is a fan of the genre. But
during the shooting, which he squeezed into an exhausting Australian
tour schedule, he was unsure at times what he had gotten himself into.

"Things were always a little vague, even sometimes the address where I
was supposed to show up," he said. "I don't know if she was doing this
to increase my sense of disorientation, to keep me in the dark. But I
guess if she was, in some ways it kind of worked. It was a strange
experience all around."

Ms. de Beer, who doesn't like to use trained actors in her works, said
she was drawn to Mr. Spencer mostly because of his weathered voice and
"world-weary face" and was pleased with the character he helped bring to
life, a businessman who seems to be trying to exorcise a lost love by
summoning her from the dead only so that he can leave her, repaying her
for abandoning him. (The dreamlike dialogue in the video was written by
Alissa Bennett, who has collaborated with Ms. de Beer before, and by Ms.
Koether.)

Ms. de Beer said during the interview in her studio one blustery
afternoon that the video was "really very personal for me, partly
because I had benched myself."

"When I finished with the initial script, it felt very important to me
to make it," she said.

Growing up in a rambling Victorian house with a widow's walk in Salem,
Mass., which still exudes an air of its witchy past, she felt that
mysticism was a kind of birthright, and it has been a more prominent
element of her work in recent years. A 2006 video, "The Quickening," set
in a cartoon-ish Puritan New England, delved into the spiritual seeking
of the French novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans and quoted from the sermon
"Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," putting the Jonathan Edwards
warhorse to work in probably the strangest context it has ever found
itself. Ms. de Beer has also borrowed from the dark, violent
post-religious mysticism of the novelist Dennis Cooper. (From his novel
"Period," used in a 2005 de Beer video: "I could open the other
dimension right now if I wanted. Or I could stay here with you. I'm kind
of like a god.")

But Ms. de Beer said that her fascination with ghosts is in one sense
simply about finding a way to explore how we all must deal with the past
and with loss as we grow older, a struggle that finds a metaphor in the
artistic process itself.

"As an artist, you shed all these objects which were the you' back in
the moment when you made them," she said. "And then you go back and
hardly recognize them and feel like the person who made them wasn't you
but someone else, like a sister or something. And you wonder What was
she like?' "